Sunday, November 3, 2013

In the interest of continuing to create context for both my work, this is how I introduced myself and Hyphen at the recent Maine International Conference on the Arts:

My name is Catherine Cabeen.
I am the Artistic Director of Hyphen, an interdisciplinary performance
company that celebrates the dancing body as a fluid intersection for ideas. I founded Hyphen in 2009 in Seattle as Catherine Cabeen and Company and changed the name recently in order to give the company a title that emulates is connective nature. Hyphen has engaged 28 interdisciplinary artists in the creation of over 30 new performance works since 2009.

I am trained in the Martha Graham technique and I have a
deep love for the theatrical grandeur of early modernist work. However, I spent the bulk of my professional
career dancing in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, where I developed
a love of honesty and transparency in performance. My own work dances on the lines between these
two polarizing aesthetics, celebrating both the kinesthetic virtuosity of the
well trained dancing body and the politics inherent in using the body as a
medium for expression. My work often
plays with gender representation because drag performances so eloquently reveal
the grand performativity of everyday life.

I am in the midst of creating a trilogy of evening-length works that celebrate Nouveau réalisme (New realism) a post World War II, European, visual art movement, in which artists focused on new ways of perceiving and depicting reality as time, space, and action, rather than as a cluster of objects. While in graduate school at the University of Washington, I became fascinated by this shift in the visual art world away from the tangible and towards the experiential. As an artist who has always worked in the ephemeral form of dance, at first I found myself rolling my eyes at this supposed “eureka” moment. Dancers and musicians have been celebrating experiential art forms for thousands of years. But as I read the New Realist Manifesto and other articles by critic Pierre Restany that situate this artistic mission, I realized that this moment of confluence between the visual and performing arts actually provides a rich conglomeration of perspectives and language that supports my own articulation of just what it is we do as modern dancers.

It’s no secret that contemporary dance is the least funded
and most commonly misunderstood of the arts.
The ever-increasing disembodiment of contemporary life has begun to
fracture the former power of metakinesis; where
audiences were once able to feel within their own bodies a resonance with what
they saw on stage, they are often now so disconnected from their own bodies as
to not recognize the movements they see before them as abstractions of a
unifying human experience. By borrowing
from the new realists a renewed enthusiasm for the sensations of space, time,
and change. I hope that my work will enliven dance for new audiences.

Into the Void, the first work in this series, premiered in 2011. The work engaged 14 interdisciplinary collaborators in creating an abstract biographical work about Yves Klein, a French Visual Artist, who led the New Realist Art Movement in the 1960s. Into the Void was commissioned by On the Boards, a theater in Seattle, and the full work can be seen through On the Boards Television, OtB’s on-line performing arts archive, and Into the Void can also be purchased on iTunes via TenduTV.

Into the Void was followed by Fire! a second commission from On the Boards, in
2013. Fire! was inspired by Niki de
Saint Phalle, the only female artist in the New Realist movement. This work engaged 13 interdisciplinary collaborators as it brought to life Saint Phalle's monumental Tarot Garden.

Hyphen is now working on MetaKinetic, the
third segment in this trilogy, which is inspired by the kinetic sculptures of
Jean Tinguely. MetaKinetic is so far being
supported by On the Boards in Seattle and the Flynn Theater in Burlington and
is scheduled to premier in 2016.

At the same time Hyphen continues to tour its ever-evolving
repertory program. The repertory program
is extremely versatile in order to fit within a large range of venues and
budgets. The evening of diverse dance
works can range from being a solo show, performed by myself, to an evening of
duets and trios, to being a large scale production with five dancers and two
live musicians. All versions of the
repertory program feature interdisciplinary collaborations between dance,
music, writing, lighting and fashion design, and visual art. This variable
programing makes performances possible in all kinds of spaces that have a range
of technical capacities. Always when I
tour I am happy to teach associated classes, as are my collaborators.

Hyphen recently performed a large scale version of its repertory program at Middlebury College. We will next perform a more intimate iteration of the program at the Flynn
Space in Burlington VT in the Fall of 2014, and we are looking for
presenting partners to share iterations of that work throughout the
region. If any of you are interested in
large scale productions I would also love to have conversations about
additional presenting partners for MetaKinetic.

On behalf of all of the artists here I would like to thank
the Maine International Conference on the Arts for giving us this opportunity
to dialogue about our work, and our faith in art as an essential component of a
human life well lived.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

I’m currently wrapping up teaching spring semester at
Middlebury College. As a freelance
choreographer and dancer who is blessed right now to hold a temporary academic
position, my mind frequently ricochets between the fortune of my temporary
financial stability and the oppression of working for a private school that
exemplifies the problematic American capitalist education system.

Though I could easily dedicate this blog to the anger that
arises in me from witnessing privilege, cloaked as education, I will instead
focus it on what I learned this year from the subject matter I engaged in with
my students. For though the system is
deeply flawed, individual students, conversations, and colleagues, continuously
rose above the party line this spring and reminded me that education is
on-going for all of us.

When the semester started I thought I was teaching 2 classes
that would have little cross over; Anatomy/Kinesiology, and a course I designed
called Ethics/Aesthetics/Body. (I also
taught advanced technique, choreographed a solo on a Sr Dance Major, advised two Sr thesis projects,
performed my own solo work locally and internationally, danced as a guest
artist with Richard Move, and choreographed a few scenes for a film… but those
experiences are for other blogs)

These two classes, one on how we feel, articulate, and move
the gross matter of our bodies, and one on how we perceive, judge and value
ourselves and each other, seemed highly oppositional when I made the
syllabi. The ethics course is deeply
rooted in my graduate research into gender representation, which is a field
that looks at everything one does as
evidence of gender expression, but decidedly does not engage biology in the
discussion. Anatomy/Kinesiology is designed to explore
the opposite, not what we do with our raced/gendered/(dis)abled bodies, but what
we are; energy organized into mass, saturated with sensation, separated into
muscles, bones, connective tissue, and systems with fancy names.

But as the semester wore on I noticed that while the
readings and discussions may have been based in different disciplines, the
point of the teaching was the same. I
kept coming back to one thing; what do you see or experience so regularly that
it is invisible to you?

In Anatomy/Kinesiology
I found that many students had never considered their bodies except for on
occasions when they were injured. Most
of them had no concept of the beauty and complexity of the physical systems
they utilize everyday to get from bed to class.
All of us develop physical habits that simplify our mind/body
connection. These habits can be extremely helpful or extremely detrimental to
our well being, but unless we know what we are doing (from slouching, to always
standing with our weight on our left leg, to grinding our teeth) and that there are other options, we cannot
determine the number of choices we are denying ourselves. It is impossible to see the value of our body’s intelligence when we are entirely attached to the way we
have patterned our selves through repetition.

Repetition is also what transforms our various gender performances into our sense of self. Repetition of the practice of confidence or
victimization creates our personality and our concept of our role in the
world. Culture’s repetitions in the form
of mass-media-marketing-strategies, capitalist government systems that support
a particular family structure, and the on-going struggle for equal wages for
equal work among different classes, genders, nationalities and races of people,
create assumptions for all of us within a system of, “the way things
are.” Unconsciously, we fit ourselves
into these systems and pattern ourselves in line with, or against their
standards. In this value-laden
conception of self, we again cannot determine the value of our heart’s
intelligence, and/or our attachments to the way we have patterned our selves through
both conscious and unconscious repetition, until we can see that our habits are actually choices.

Frequently in my years of teaching dance related subjects, I
have found that the best of what I have to offer the students I work with comes
from my 18-year (and counting) study of vinyasa yoga. This semester proved to be no exception, in
fact Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga even have a single word for this shockingly interdisciplinary habitual body/mind;Samskara.

Samskara defines physical and mental patterning as not only the
product of this lifetime, but a response to the accumulation of multiple
lifetimes of habit building. Whether or not you
believe in reincarnation, the habits of multiple lifetimes are surely what
create the cultural/social traditions that enmesh, condition and define us. Samskara explains how the habits of consciousness we develop in this lifetime, which manifest as our physical posture, intertwine with cultural, raced,
gendered, classed memory causing our bodies and minds to be subjected to
infinitely more unconscious instructions than conscious ones.

Whether we are
talking about tucking our pelvis under as a weakness in our lower back and
strain on our hip flexors, or a conditioned response to being told that our
butt is too big to be in a certain kind of dance class, we are talking about a
detrimental physical/mental habit that the practitioner needs to become aware
of, before they can respond to it in a healthy way.
If the realization of pelvic miss-alignment comes through a conversation
about the relationship between the curved sacrum and pelvis or an articulation
of the lingering Western European dominance in popular dance and marketing
aesthetics, it doesn’t really matter.
What the student needs to do is to pause their habitual reactions to what they are experiencing long
enough to actually feel their own pelvis.
Where is it right now?

“Why am I doing
what I am doing?” is an excellent question, but useless, unless one first knows
what they are doing and that, more often than not,it is a choice.

One cannot make a
change unless one knows where one is to begin with. That requires listening, feeling, and not holding on so tightly to what you think you know that you cannot see that, "you are a victim of the rules you live by." (Jenny Holzer).

Our embodied experience is contextual and always in motion. The body's inescapability as our main sensory means of experiencing the world we live in, and its constant state of change, can teach us that mental constructs such as

Right/Wrong, Good/Bad, Beautiful/Ugly are also contextual concepts.

It is interesting to teach in a liberal arts institution. There are a lot of ideas bouncing around. But in terms of giving the students an opportunity to actually learn something, I am increasingly grateful that I teach an embodied discipline... mostly so that I don't need to justify teaching meditation. All this liberal arts education is pretty useless with out enough space in it for students to occasionally pause and witness the journey they are on. It is through this understanding, that we are all changing constantly, and that all of life is a process, that students will be able to manifest their own power to contribute to/conduct that flow.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

I've been called a great many things. Labels help us to define our experiences, and at the same time they limit our growth. Names and Labels reek of our human desire to hold fast to our understanding of something, in a world that is in constant motion. I founded Catherine Cabeen and Company (CCC) in 2009, to explore how interdisciplinary research and collaboration can be used to build new movement vocabularies. In the last four years CCC has engaged 30 interdisciplinary artists and created over 22 collaborative works.

Catherine Cabeen in Fire!photo by Phill Cabeen

But as my base shifts from the west to east coast and the collaborations I engage in reorient their dynamics, I find that "Catherine Cabeen and Company" is not a name that supports the integration of dance and ideas that I am after. So, CCC is now becoming Hyphen.The mission is the same, and hopefully this name will help us to move forward as an entity based in connection. Hyphen, as what we need to "co-exist," or make a "well-thought-out-plan."

“Unresolved”
while City Arts concludes that lack of resolution is a virtue, “Fire! presents a picture of women—independent, trapped, escaping,
congregating—in a way that is esoteric. Why are they doing this? Where is it
going? What’s the end result? Even that is open-ended. But perhaps we aren’t
supposed to walk away with hard and fast conclusions. Perhaps we can just
appreciate the dance for what it is—beautiful, expressive, emotional movement;
a form of art where the body is both the means and the end.”

Personally, I agree with Dance Scholar Susan Manning that,

“The more contentious the conversation the more
interesting…” so I am thrilled with the contradictions. I am glad that CCC and OtB gave Seattle
audiences something to talk about, whether they raved about the show- or it
made them raving mad.

As we move on into our next projects, everyone in CCC is
stimulated by the questions Fire! revealed about answers we thought we knew...

Ironically, the one thing the reviews seem to agree on is that my performance quality was "distractingly compelling." Many reviews claimed they couldn't look at the work as a whole because I so dominated the scene. I have loved dance with all of my heart, for all of my life. I'm glad the fruits of my efforts show to most people, however, these comments are also oddly offensive in this context. When I started researching Niki de Saint Phalle, I was struck by how the reviews of her early shows were all about her physical presence, costume, body type... and barely about her work. Perhaps my greatest nod to her in this work is not through the production at all, but rather through how it was perceived- as something that's worth, due to it being made by a female artist, lies only in the beauty of its maker. Saint Phalle banked on that- perhaps I do too- only I am conflicted by my consciousness of it being problematic.

"The male gaze theory forces the feminist dance scholar into a no-win situation that turns on an exceedingly unproductive "succeed or fail" criterion. We expect the choreographer to topple a power structure that we have theorized as monolithic. The dancer or choreographer under consideration will always be condemned as a reinforcement of the patriarchal status quo, despite any transgressive behavior, because, by definition, that which is communicated arises from within the fabric of culture, that is to say, within patriarchy." -Ann Daly 1992

The reason I do these projects that look back into history, is unfortunately, sometimes, to point out how little has changed.

About Catherine Cabeen

Catherine Cabeen, MFA, is an artist and teacher. Cabeen is the Artistic Director of Catherine Cabeen - Hyphen, a performance company that was founded in 2009 as a forum for creating dynamic, interdisciplinary performances that engage the body as the intersection for ideas.
Cabeen has received choreographic commissions from On the Boards, Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater, TWU, the Visa2Dance Festival in Dar Es Salaam, the International Dance Day Festival in Byblos, Lebanon, Pig Iron Theater Company, and the Cabiri, among others.
The New York Times has called Cabeen’s Hyphen, “highly kinetic, complex... visually exquisite,” and “beautifully performed.” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
Cabeen is a former member of the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (1997-2005), and the Martha Graham Dance Company, among others.
She currently performs in her own work, and with Richard Move. Cabeen is also an Assistant Professor at Marymount Manhattan College and a regisseur for the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
For more information see catherinecabeen.com